HAYNES

The Portland metro area continues to lose jobs (though not a lot), our unemployment rate is holding steady, and I’ve finally got a good working definition of the term “living hourly wage.”

All thanks to Jake Procino, workforce analyst and economist from the Oregon Employment Department, who releases a monthly report on economic indicators for the Portland region.

Here are our takeaways from his October report — there was this wee election this month that kept the newsroom busy, or we’d have gotten to this sooner.

Note: The “Portland region” means the Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Clackamas, Columbia, Multnomah, Washington and Yamhill counties in Oregon, and Clark and Skamania counties in Washington. That’s the area you’ll see referred to as the Portland MSA.

1. Defining living hourly wage

This is a bit of data that floats through news stories, but which I’ve always had a tough time understanding. Now, thanks to Procino, I’ve got the answer.

He used the Living Wage calculator, courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It provides living wage estimates for different regions across the United States.

What he came up with is the chart below. It’s broken out into families with no children through three children, and for families in which one or both parent is employed.

 Living Hourly Wage in the Portland Area 

	0 Children	1 Child	2 Children	3 Children
1 Adult	$27.04	$47.01	$61.38	$80.42
2 Adults (1 working)	$36.05	$42.22	$47.39	$53.12
2 Adults (both working)	$18.03	$25.86	$33.26	$39.69

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By the way, you can do the same with any U.S. city by going to the MIT website.

The MIT site also explains the costs of each basic need that go into estimating the living wage, using 11 factors such as the average cost of housing, medical care, transportation, etc., in our region. It’s fascinating stuff, if you’re wonky. Interesting fact: The cost of child care is a huge factor and varies wildly. It’s $0 for childless families or for families in which one parent stays at home to care for kids, but it jumps to $42,153 annually for families with three children and both parents working.

2. Tracking employment

Oregon’s total nonfarm payroll employment barely grew 0.1%, adding 2,500 jobs over the last 12 months ending in September, Procino noted. (Note: Economists often use “nonfarm payroll employment” because, if you add in farm jobs, it skews the numbers.)

Multnomah County’s employment contracted -0.7%, losing about 3,800 jobs over the same time period.

For the entire Portland MSA (that’s the seven-county area, noted above), employment level inched up 0.1% year-over-year ending in August. All this data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Which cities in the United States are growing the fastest? That’d be Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, at 3.7% and 2.7% growth, respectively. And where, apparently, the lack of potable water isn’t as big a deal-breaker as I would’ve thought.

Baltimore and Chicago saw no growth. While Denver, Memphis and Milwaukee are shrinking.

You can see for yourself.

3. So does that mean our unemployment rate is rising or falling?

Neither, very much.

Procino says that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in Oregon held at 4% in September, moderately higher than last year at the same time, when it was 3.9%.

That means Oregon’s unemployment is similar to that of the United States, which sits at 4.1%.

Multnomah County’s and the Portland MSA’s unemployment rate held steady at 3.9% and 4.0% in September. Both rates are about the same as they were a year ago.

4. A look at farming

Procino also takes one interesting little snippet of our economy and explains it each month. And this time, he picked Oregon crop production.

Sometimes in the Portland area, we forget that Oregon is an agricultural state. This is a good reminder.

Just look at these numbers: Oregon farm acreage totaled about 15.3 million acres in 2022, with 35,547 farms and about 70,500 producers.

The state’s agricultural product sales were $6.7 billion, ranging from a high of $874.6 million in Marion County to a low of $7 million in Lincoln County. And five counties — Clackamas, Malheur, Marion, Morrow and Umatilla — combined to produce half of the state’s agricultural sales.

In fact, crop sales accounted for $4.7 billion or about 69% of Oregon’s total sales.

And Oregon’s vegetables, melons, potatoes and sweet potatoes sales ranked seventh nationally with $733 million, or about 16% of total crop sales in the nation.

Dana Haynes is editor in chief of the Portland Tribune.